Racing legend Dick Johnson reflects on an epic career
After ending his Bathurst drought this year, touring car legend Dick Johnson has seen and done it all on the track — and today he tells The Sunday Mail all about a life on four wheels.
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Dick Johnson is a touring car legend who just keeps touring.
The colourful Queenslander, 74, this month broke a 25 year Bathurst drought when his team star Scott McLaughlin took the race in controversial circumstances.
Such is Johnson’s popularity that his autograph is still chased by legions of motorsport fans.
Here he talks about the Bathurst win, cut lunches, why Ayrton Senna was a legend, old cars who wouldn’t obey orders and how he could not draw a stick man at school.
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Will you ever retire or is the lure of the track too great?
I have heard so many people say if you stop you die.
I suppose you start dying from the day you are born but I want to go out in a blaze of glory.
They keep giving me stuff to do and I was dumb enough to get another workshop where we are doing the touring car masters car for my son Steve to drive. We are going to rebuild one of our old Sierras.
How would you describe those old cars you used to drive?
They were like most women. They were unpredictable. It taught me a lot about married life. They would never do the same thing twice. It was always difficult to get them to respond the way you wanted to. That was the thing about driving them.
Have they changed much?
It is a totally different experience to driving today’s cars which are purpose built race cars which do everything right. You know where the limits are. With the old cars the limits changed from lap to lap.
Can we assume from that that it would be easier for an old time driver to get used to today’s cars than the other way around?
Well a lot of the drivers brought up with today’s cars would find it difficult to wring a lap out of the old cars. These days the drivers have so much information which tell the drivers where they are right and wrong.
If you are bringing back masters cars does that mean you have to bring back traditions like John French’s cut lunch in your Bathurst car?
My main memory of that is not so much the lunch he put in the console but the fact that Bathurst used to be the last race of the year. You would put the car back in the garage for a few weeks. When you got back there would be a stench and it would be that lunch that never got eaten.
We heard you were spotted back at your old school — the Cavendish Road State High School — during the week. What’s cooking?
They have named one of their sports houses after me. It is a great school with good people and I love supporting things like that. I was not recognised for my schoolwork. One of my subjects was art and I cannot even draw a stick man.
What about the drama with your star Scott McLaughlin winning Bathurst after stablemate Fabian Coulthard had been urged by your team to drive slowly during a safety car period? Did it tarnish the win?
That was done by two people and had absolutely nothing else to do with anyone else in the team. Obviously you have an engineer and a driver. As far as I am concerned that is where it finishes and it would not have changed the outcome of the event in any way shape or form. It is just trial by media or should I say social media.
Are drivers finding social media criticism difficult to handle?
Yeah but I have the easy fix to that … don’t read it. You know when you are right or wrong. If you start believing that sort of stuff you are in trouble. If you have done the right thing don’t take any notice of it.
So do you mentor Scott or does he go his own way?
If he wants to find out something he will ask me but he is a fairly well balanced guy. We have had a lot of well-balanced guys in our team over the years — some have had chips on both shoulders — but Scotty is a guy who is straight up and down and is his own man.
You went through national service. What did it mean for you?
It takes you out of your comfort zone of being with your parents. Kids stay with their parents forever. I was a homebody then suddenly I was in the big wide world on my own. I still talk to some guys who I went through with. It taught me discipline and respect.
What sort of menial task can you remember for national service?
You learnt to stick up for your mate. No one is alone. You are a team.
Do you still have a Jim Beam on race day?
A man’s not a camel I can tell you but only ever in the evenings. I never drink in the day. That is my drink of choice.
You didn’t drink at all when you were doing national service, did you?
No, I was the designated driver so to speak. When I was at Kapooka I was the one who had to hold some of the boys upright when we got back to our accommodation which was an old Igloo tent.
Which is your favourite car of all time?
Anyone that won a race was my favourite. The car which kick-started my career was the True Blue Falcon. It is still around. I sold all my cars to one guy — David Bowden — and its is good to see they are still around.
In your book you said there was a time when you were $9 million in debt. You did very well to fight your way back but you must have thought it was going to be the end of you?
Yes, at times. Guys talk about having depression but you just have to pull yourself out of it because there is always a solution to every problem. I got screwed by quite a few people over the years. Now I have the right people that is no longer the case. That is the reason we have surfaced again in the big time.
Was selling your cars an emotional experience?
It was a do or die thing. If I did not do it at that point in time we would not have survived. I would have done everything. During that period — and this is why I have a lot of the guys still with me now — there was not one week when they did not get paid.
How have you found the digital age?
I would enjoy it if I understood it but for people my age it is a bit of a struggle. Maybe I am just lazy and don’t sit down and read what you have got to do. I keep pushing buttons and if something happens it happens.
If you could have been a Formula One driver who would you have liked to have been?
Absolutely it would have been (Scotland’s) Jim Clarke who I felt was special because he had so much talent and in later years Ayrtor Senna was great. When you see a guy almost win at Monaco in a dreadful old shitbox of a car in the wet … he was great.
You will always be remembered for hitting a giant rock at Bathurst in 1980. Was that good or bad for your career?
At the time it was instantly bad — I can see my bank manager’s face — but it was the best thing that happened. One of the major people who helped me who said whatever was donated to me he would match is here this weekend. Edsell Ford II was the vice president of Ford Australia probably thought they would raise four or five grand but seventy eight grand later it became quite a big deal.
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